1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image matching system for matching, for example, two blood vessel images, fingerprint images, still images, moving images, and other images and a program and an image matching method for the same.
2. Description of the Related Art
As systems for matching based on image information, various image matching systems are known. For example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2000-194862 discloses an information processing apparatus for comparing for example registered images against an image for comparison, that is, a “match image”, in a predetermined positional relationship to calculate correlation values and matching a registered image against the match image based on the correlation values or an information processing apparatus generating correlation values by processing in units of pixels at the time of generating the correlation values.
In the above image matching system, however, it is necessary to judge for example with which registered image among a plurality of registered images stored in a data base the match image coincides. At this time, the match image is successively matched against the registered images in the data base, but it suffers from the disadvantage that the larger the number of the registered images stored in the data base, the longer the match processing time. Improvement is desired.